3153: Game Lounge's Vision for Agentic AI in a Changing Regulatory Landscape

[00:00:03] Have you ever wondered how agentic AI might reshape the iGaming landscape and influence how we work across the broader tech world? Well, this is an area I want to explore today, and I'm going to be joined by Richard Dennings, and he's going to be bringing with him first-hand insights into the practical opportunities and challenges that this powerful technology can present.

[00:00:28] Whether it be automated processes transforming affiliate marketing, possibility of regulation accidentally fueling black market growth. Richard brings with him a unique perspective on how AI can benefit both businesses' efficiency and society, while also raising a few concerns that we shouldn't ignore.

[00:00:50] So today I want to learn about how Game Lounge is successfully blending AI with strategic thinking to deliver standout results, and what these shifts mean for careers in a rapidly evolving industry, and what it means for your industry too. I think all too often we hear about the hype of the next big buzzword, whether it be AI or Gen AI or currently agentic AI. But what does this mean for you? What does this mean for your career? What does this mean for your business?

[00:01:20] And if we've got time, I also want to explore some of the potential for AI-driven breakthroughs. So will this next wave of innovation spot growth and progress all create bigger problems if we're not prepared? And what can we all do to prepare? Let's find out together as I welcome Richard onto the podcast now. So a massive warm welcome to the show. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do? Hi there, Neil. Thanks for inviting me.

[00:01:50] My name is Richard Dennis. I'm the CEO of a company called Game Lounge. We're one of the larger iGaming affiliates, particularly in Casino, based in Malta. A company's been there for a while, and I joined the company in February. It's been a few months. Before that, I've worked in affiliate marketing for a long time. Prior to this, I ran a company called Webgangs, which is an affiliate network, European e-commerce and retail. And then prior to that, I was working in, I've always worked in marketing. I had my own travel business for a while.

[00:02:20] And before that, I had to do a degree in marketing. And yeah, I'm British from the UK, but I've lived in lots of different countries. So I enjoy leadership. I enjoy growth. I'm very focused on new technologies. And we've applied that since I've joined Game Lounge, and it's been pretty successful so far. Well, thank you for joining me today. And towards the end of 2024, there was a lot of hype around agentic AI. I think Gartner featured it as the top trend for 2025.

[00:02:47] So it looks like it's going to continue that trend throughout the year. And agentic AI is also poised to revolutionise just about every industry. So that's one of the reasons I invited you on the podcast today. So how is Game Lounge already leveraging this technology through its GLX startup incubator? And what potential do you see for it to reshape the affiliate and gaming sectors?

[00:03:10] Because we hear a lot about the buzzword agentic AI, but I'd love to hear more about what value you see and how you're using it. Game Lounge is a standard casino affiliate. The model is pretty standard. It's been around for a long time, 10, 20 years. Companies that have been doing the work successfully for a long time are finding very difficult to change. I used to work with Nokia. I've worked for a couple of other companies where the model that kept them going in the end got disrupted out and then they struggled.

[00:03:39] And I can see that potentially happening by gaming and particularly affiliation. But the question is whether or not it's today or tomorrow, whether it's a Horizon 1 thing or a Horizon 2 thing or even a Horizon 3 thing. I think we've seen a few things, a few issues and concepts coming through. So if you think about GPT and LLMs, they exploded onto the world roughly two years ago now. And you can see how far things have gone.

[00:04:05] Having said that, there's been a kind of limit of understanding of what you can actually really do with LLMs. Yes, they're pretty cool to help you write things, do job applications, but they haven't really automated too much. And I think there's a bit of debate at the moment about whether it's adding anything particularly to GDP and overall growth. There's no doubt about the fact that people are using it, it's been adopted. So they're in the kind of first high curve and it'll go down and it'll come back up again in a much more considered way. And I guess we're going to see the same with the GenTech. A GenTech is, people say, what is it?

[00:04:34] It's effectively just automating processes in an intelligent way using artificial agents. And if you imagine, if you think about the SaaS industry, software as a service, we've got another part of our business that looks at that. Over the last 20 years, software as a service has become huge from very, very early stages with things like Salesforce and other vendors like that. And now there's just millions and millions and millions of startups, each in a little tiny niche.

[00:04:59] And I think GenTech is going to be quite good at eating that because you probably won't need to do all the kind of interoperability between different bits of microservices SaaS. So that's probably one of the things we'll see first starts to come into the industry. You can only really go as fast as your brain. So the brain of an industry and the brain of humans. So there's a few people out there doing quite exciting cutting edge stuff using GenTech, but not really in the mainstream.

[00:05:24] It tends to be on lots of little tiny things that they're doing in processing back offices and banks and things like that. But we will definitely see this coming through forward. So if I imagine what we're doing, we write reviews, we have directory listings, we're looking at new markets. There's lots of things that we have in our business that are very manual and very low value that we are using people who are not necessarily too cheap. So we hire good people and they're very smart and they know what they're doing.

[00:05:50] But there's a lot of manual processes that I think GenTech will start to eat very, very early on. And that's certainly what we're looking at. Form GLX as a side business game lounge, simply to almost disrupt ourselves. To take the model that we've been so good at making money from over the years, we can see my edge quite soon and just invent new ways and new processes by call.org. Not just in terms of, right, we're going to try and be more efficient and use less resource, but to go faster and to go harder.

[00:06:18] And actually, people who've worked with me for a long time know that I use this phrase, more brains, less hands. So it just enables a lot more brain power to exist and a bit more rewarding work rather than literally writing another slot machine review or promoting another casino on a listing. We can probably put most of that into automation. More brains, less hands. Love that line. From the outside looking in at your industry, there are stricter gambling regulations that are continuously on the rise.

[00:06:48] And one of the things that I was reading about you before you came on is you highlighted the unintended consequences of pushing a player towards an unregulated market. So does a Gentic AI amplify that risk? And if it does, what can be done to mitigate it and mitigate its use in black market operations? It's probably something that you've encountered or heard about a lot. But what do you see here? Yeah, I mean, the benefit and advantage of being an affiliate like we are, we see a lot. We own the traffic.

[00:07:17] And we see the traffic. And this traffic is players, is casino players, slot machine players. And we see them moving around because we can obviously see them through our systems and popping up on different markets and things. There's two issues. One is with regulation. Obviously, governments like regulation because it makes them feel warm and fuzzy about player safety. The theory is the more regulation, the less players will pay for casinos and therefore stay away of harm, which can be very material, whether it's financial harm or physical harm.

[00:07:46] That's obviously a high priority for everybody and it should always be. The other thing is tax raising because obviously tax stuff they regulate. So in some markets, taxes have gone up. In other markets, fee restrictions have gone up and affordability checks. And in the UK, you now have to provide KYC. You have to put details about your bank statements and there's a limit on what you can gamble. And that's all very fine. That's good. And in some ways you think that's a good idea. But unfortunately, there's an alternative. So the alternative is if I want to gamble, I'm going to gamble.

[00:08:16] And whether that's through a named operator or a good service, but that's been regulated, or they go on Telegram or WhatsApp, they join a community, they're gambling in seconds and there's no KYC whatsoever. The line of least resistance means that they will go to that second option. And we are seeing that. And there's already, if you go on Telegram now, just do a quick search for slots, we'll see at least one or two operators and you can see how many people are playing. And it's many millions a month. I think there's one I saw yesterday, 3.4 million players a month.

[00:08:45] And it's all crypto as well. They're all being pushed into that world. And we're not, once we're in that world, why would you ever come back? The dangers and the difficulties around over-regulation. I'm saying regulation is a bad thing. I'm saying it's a good thing, but it's balanced in some markets more than others. But over-regulation, where you are literally making it too difficult to do the thing you want to do, is going to push people and has pushed people and will push people into black market or unlicensed operations, which is far more dangerous and insidious than in the world they currently exist.

[00:09:15] The people that affects mostly under 25s, which are the ones that everyone's supposed to be protecting. Any kind of automated operation, whether that's a tool to help these people find new ways to make money or to actually automate the way they play games. It's coming, it's coming to everybody. Nothing that's going to stop this happening. I think it will impact every industry, not only ours, but it's going to be very interesting to see who the first people that adopt it will be.

[00:09:40] And they will pretty much be the guys that are smartest and make the most money, which usually means black market. So I think we do need to wake up to this, especially on a regulation level. We just understand the risks and rewards on some of the decisions the government's making. And I think when talking about the rise of Agente K.I., there are increasing conversations about, hey, how will this disrupt remote service roles?

[00:10:03] Will it require workers to transition into almost AI trainers and strategic decision makers? How do you see this playing out? And any advice that you'd offer to any individuals or indeed businesses that are preparing for this workforce transformation throughout 2025? Yeah, I think it's going to be something that people aren't expecting. I had a meeting yesterday with somebody about this and my first conversation was because we have so much traffic and we want to do some sample surveys and just understand some opinion based stuff.

[00:10:33] All my career, I've always done opinion based research to understand what's in people's minds as they're playing and they're not just dots and dashes on a Google Analytics page. And then I just happened to say, well, we need to run some opinion surveys because we want to see whether people are familiar with the black market or not. And then we were talking about Agente K.I.T. and they were saying, well, actually, there's some research done recently where they're using this technology to create players. And these players are AI agentic players or it wasn't actually in gambling.

[00:11:01] It was in something else, but it's effectively customers, online customers going through the whole purchase process of whatever they're buying and creating these, they call them synthetic users or synthetic peer groups. So just in terms of usability UX, you can kind of create these synthetic audiences that would behave as normal human beings would behave. You can create synthetic focus groups based around what people are playing and not playing. I think that's a good example of where we instantly can add value with these things.

[00:11:31] In terms of what might be threatening for everybody that's in a kind of manual process, whether that's software development or customer services, anything that's a kind of by the hour rate. Even the, well, of course, things like campaign management within digital marketing, all these things that multiple process that can be organized. If you imagine a robot in a car factory, you point the way you want them to go and do what they want to do once. And they'll do that for million times afterwards.

[00:11:57] But that is what Agente P is going to be a lot of people who are disrupted by this in terms of their own jobs. But on the other hand, we're going to need trainers. We need to know people that can. It's a bit like the prompt engineers now that we've got for L&M. L&M is complex and they can do a lot more than most of us use. If you understand how that prompt engineering works, you're a very valuable person. And therefore, you'll have something like Agente engineers or Agente process engineers. It will be coming from normal jobs, software engineering or customer services, things like that.

[00:12:25] And so then if you want to be smart about your career, you need to position yourself as one of these engineers or trainers. Because the rest of everybody is just sort of sitting there in their bedrooms and taking their salaries and not working that hard. I think the ones that are going to go first. And when I was doing a little research on you, just expanding on that, I also read that you've emphasized this importance of physical presence in the workplace for career survival in the AI era.

[00:12:53] And as you mentioned there, you're not just sat in a spare room phoning your performance in, so to speak. So why do you think maintaining visibility with decision makers and knowledge transfer will be so critical? And how can professionals position themselves better for success, do you think? Any advice there? Yeah, it's a difficult one.

[00:13:13] If I think about my early stage career, when I was just starting out, my father and also a couple of other people said to me, the thing about life is you have to go and get it. You have to be out there. You have to be on the front foot the whole time, because if you don't, somebody else will be. It's a very competitive world. It's not necessarily a fair world. And so don't treat it as a kind of democracy, treat it as an autocracy and just go for it. And I've always done that. And maybe that's why I've got to where I've got to. But I hear these conversations.

[00:13:41] I call them the 10.30 p.m. conversations, because usually at an event or some kind of social gathering, it's all very friendly. And then once everyone's had a few drinks, they tell you what they think. And I call it the 10.30 conversation, because usually around 10.30 people are getting very relaxed in what they say to the CEO. And usually the conversation is along the lines of why aren't I going faster? Why aren't I doing more? Why aren't you giving me a promotion? I've been here a long time. What's in it for me?

[00:14:07] And I always say, look, number one, I don't really know who you are, which is obviously if somebody is four or five levels down. And I say in a jokey way, and I say, no, really, you need to just keep your profile high. You need to, it's all very well doing your job and managing your subordinates who you've got a team. But you really need to manage upwards. Managing upwards is a very important part of your job. And then certainly in a kind of senior role, it's almost the most important thing. And visibility within any organization doesn't have to mean you're shouting around going on.

[00:14:34] It's just being aware and people being aware that you exist. And it's a very important part. Now, I'm not saying you have to come into the job and into the office every day and sit next to me and talk to me. I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying is be present, do a little bit more, come up with some ideas and really kind of promote your internal brand. That's very important. And certainly in these agentic AI worlds where functions are going to get disruptive, it's the people who are kind of seeing to understand how that might work.

[00:15:04] And they're thinking in their own second and third horizons of their careers, as opposed to thinking, well, why aren't you paying me more money? And I want more holidays. I get it. And yes, there's a work life balance. But at the same time, you just have to be cognizant as you go through your career that hard work isn't always recognized. And sometimes it can be taken by other people. Not everybody's a fair, fun, kind, friendly person. We're in this world sometimes where people do treat each other as a zero sum relationship, which I don't like. And I try and keep out of my companies.

[00:15:33] But nevertheless, it does exist. So my point is be present, be aware, add value beyond your role, and you should be fine. Love that. And also love the beginning of your answer there, the wise words from your dad. I absolutely love that. It gave you a good grounding there. And I think some of the most valuable conversations we have are those 10.30 p.m. conversations sometimes. But how do you see deep industry expertise, creative problem solving, relationship building?

[00:16:02] Do you see these things becoming more valuable as routine tasks are increasingly handled by AI systems? Because it feels like the areas that AI cannot compete with. But what do you see here? Yeah. I mean, irrespective of AI, I mean, of course, that's going to accelerate the need for it. But because we're in much more of a hybrid stroke remote world now, that world has changed. Everybody's talked for, I think, last year about, right, we're going to do RTOs three days, five days in the office. Days are over. That ship has sailed. The five days in the office thing is gone.

[00:16:32] And Spotify, they're very famously saying, if you want to employ adults, don't treat my children. I really subscribe to that. If you want good people, you're always going to have to be, especially in Malte, it's a small island. It's a very competitive talent marketplace. And if you're going to insist on everyone in the office every day, then you're going to do something up your start. So we're not going to do that. But we are gearing up for much more flexible, decentralized organization. On the other hand, it's much more data driven. We are very careful and cautious about hiring people.

[00:17:01] We go through a big process. There's lots of stages. There's lots of psychometrics. We really need to be very careful and cautious on the caliber of the person we bring in. And then once they're in, we really are very good on career opportunities and training and just providing them a reason to stay around and improve. Our core message for game managers now we've introduced our value proposition for employees is level up and leap forward.

[00:17:25] And we're saying to everybody, if you commit to continuous learning and you commit to yourselves to getting better and being the best person you can be within the role you're doing, then we commit to you that we will look after you and we will accelerate your career as quickly as we can. And that's a commitment. I call it the promise statement. We're making promises to each other. And it kind of works. You have to do that. You have to trust each other because I've got 200 staff and they're in 40 different countries.

[00:17:51] We need to trust each other that they're actually going to be motivated to help us reach our targets together. And that will become more accentuated with the rise of agentic and AI, because if somebody doesn't seem not going to add value or that role doesn't seem to be particularly skilled, then we will definitely work hard to automate it. So it's important. These are the important parts of careers right now. And even being employed right now is almost like an outmoded prospect of you thinking about using people as a resource.

[00:18:18] Having said that, if you can get people working on a side and you achieve flow, which I talk about a lot internally, then you can achieve anything. And that's very, very important. The last thing we'll do is get rid of emotions around teamwork and team performance. And as for game lounge, I was reading before you came on the podcast that you've achieved remarkable growth under your leadership. And some stats that I found was a 30% increase in net profit and operations across more than 60 different countries.

[00:18:46] So as this is a tech podcast, every day tries to shine a light on some of the real world impacts of tech on business. How has your approach to integrating AI driven solutions contributed to your success, would you say? And have you learned any lessons along the way that maybe people listening from other industries are listening could learn from your strategy too? Well, I was hired in the first place because the company was, it wasn't doing badly. It was doing okay, but it just wasn't winning.

[00:19:13] I mean, I mean, we have this thing, we could ask each other the whole time internally, are we winning? And what does winning look like? And winning looks like a growth of at least 20% in profitability year on year. We're not listed. We're not really public. You can't really see what we do internally. And therefore it was a difficult understanding within the company of whether the company is doing well or not. It was making money, but the ratios of the earnings and the gearing on the business pretty low compared to some of our peer groups. I've thrived on a mandate to try and just calm everything down because there's so many things going on.

[00:19:41] There's lots of different projects, lots of different processes, lots of different teams. They'd made some acquisitions that hadn't quite worked out. And I don't think anyone really knew what to do in terms of focusing the business. So all I've really done is just chopped away all the stuff that was long. I love working in, I call it home zone. We're in the home zone now. We are a casino SEO affiliate and we do that very well. And that's how we make our money. I arrived and we were there of the domain betting.com.

[00:20:09] We had a sports betting business that was a publishing business. And it just wasn't doing what it was supposed to have done. It was not meeting its potential. So we quickly sold that to a competitor and then cleared down the cost of that. So instantly that was a liftability and also our bank account. And then we could use that to reinvest into, again, a business in our home zone. So we bought a business in the Netherlands that does exactly what we do, but a higher net profit than we have.

[00:20:35] And we're using that as a training piece to educate the rest of the company to say, look, guys, we might be doing 51% net. This business is doing 87% net. So let's do more what they do. In terms of AI, that hasn't really come in yet in terms of what we're doing to improve efficiencies. But clearly it's quite easy to make more profit by reducing costs, but it's very difficult to increase profit by improving revenues. And AI is going to help us in a number of ways.

[00:21:03] Whether that's in the technology side of things and showing us the way, doing a lot more industry research or looking at our data and being a bit more intelligent on the actual insight. You call it the what, the so what, and the now what. There's so much data out there in every business, which is why we call it the what. What is this data? There's less context. So what does it mean? The so what. And there's almost never the now what, which is what the hell are we going to do with all this information?

[00:21:29] And so we're trying to turn ourselves into a now what business using a lot more intelligent AI and signposting. And then from there, we can also do things like pretty operational things like how we present the UX to particular users. That can be a very intelligent way of doing that. You can use machine learning for those kinds of things. We're not going to use machine learning and AI to write content because I think there's been quite a lot of businesses to fall afoul of that trap.

[00:21:53] They thought, yes, we can just explode our content production using LLMs and hey, Presto, Google sees it and issues penalties around that. So it's not helpful content. So it's just a kind of AI is no longer a competitive feature. It's a table stake. It's if you aren't using AI, then you're going to be falling behind. It doesn't mean you're going to give you gives you a natural advantage, but it just means that you can be a little bit smarter, a little bit cuter. And again, going back to the more bracelets hands, a little, little less operational.

[00:22:21] And if we zoom out for a moment and look beyond the iGaming industry and ask you to look into my virtual crystal ball, how do you see a Gentic AI dynamically transforming the broader tech landscape, broader business landscape? And do you see any big opportunities or risks that business leaders listening in other sectors should be maybe anticipating anything that you see here or anything you're monitoring? Yeah, I think it's going to change everything. I think it's going to change literally every single thing that we do.

[00:22:49] It's an opportunity. If you think about and medical science, all those kinds of things, it's already coming up with new drug discoveries using a combination of different pharmaceuticals to help problems that we already have in a much more intelligent way and much faster. So in terms of humanity, it's going to speed us up. It's definitely going to affect everything. If you think about anything that's a manual process that I call it the Detroit effect, Detroit was the center of the US car making industry.

[00:23:19] And then along comes robots and just makes completely redundant, any kind of manual work in sort of repetitive work within car automated manufacturers. And the effect was Detroit became a ghost city. And I think we've got central for that in lots of areas within digital building and just the way that we live our lives. Well, thank you so much for sitting down with me today, sharing your insights around agentic AI. Some of the fantastic growth that you've enjoyed as a result of that, too. But before I let you go, I'm going to have a little bit of fun with you now.

[00:23:48] I always ask my guests to leave either a book that has inspired them or they'd recommend that we can add to our Amazon wishlist or a song that we can add to a Spotify playlist that means something to them. Either is allowed, even both guilty pleasures are allowed. But what would you like to leave and why? Okay. Well, I mean, it's a song. But before I say that, there are lots of books that inspire me, but particularly Jeffrey Moore, the Crossing the Chasm, Escape Velocity, all those kind of books he's written have been massively influential on me.

[00:24:15] I basically think in strategic terms based on what he's written. And there's obviously the Ben Horowitz books and there's a few others as well. But going back to a bit more frivolous way, my father is actually a musician. And in 1973, he wrote with another guy. He basically composed a piece of music called Dance of the Devil, which is a drumming record by Cozy Powell. Yeah. It was a big hit. And that song has basically paid for most of our life.

[00:24:43] The royalties from that song, it's been a constant feature. It's actually a pretty good piece of music. And it appears in things now and again, like Top Gear. It's in Hot Fuzz. There's lots of ways that you can hear it and all the people in the audience will probably remember it from the 70s. It's a pretty seminal piece of drumming from a guy called Cozy, who sadly died, I think, in the 80s. But that is our kind of constant resonant beat in our family as I've been growing up all the way through. My dad's kind of lived a life on it and paid for my brother to go to private school and all those kind of good things.

[00:25:11] So yeah, Dance of the Devil is a very important part. And then sometimes when I just want a bit of motivation, I'll just play that to myself and it always gets me going. Wow. What a great choice. And I often, when I ask that question, I ask people, what is the soundtrack to their life when asking for that song? And that one is quite literally the soundtrack to your entire family's life, right? Exactly that. Yeah, exactly. Well, thank you so much. I will get that song added to the Spotify playlist. I'll also add the book you mentioned to the wishlist as well.

[00:25:38] And for anyone listening, just wanting to dig a little bit deeper on anything we talked about today. Find out more about Game Lounge, connect with you or your team. Where would you like to point everyone? Well, obviously, the game.com is our domain and then on LinkedIn, Richard Dennis, and you can easily find me. Well, we've covered so much there from the impacts of agentic AI, work transformation throughout 2025. The in-person impact, that internal within your organization, the skills evolution. So much more we could talk about.

[00:26:06] But I think it's, especially at the beginning of 2025, there's so much to think about there. So thank you for sharing your story today. Thanks very much, Neil. Thank you. Happy New Year. So a big thank you to Richard for sharing such a look at how agentic AI is changing the game in iGaming and beyond.

[00:26:24] I think his thoughts on balancing regulation, protecting users and preparing for workforce as changes really highlight both the optimism and uncertainty that surrounds this next phase of technology. And reflecting on our conversation, I think it's clear that businesses hoping to stay competitive will need to adjust quickly, whether that involves upgrading their skills or reimagining strategies. But for everyone listening, I want to hear more about you, what you think about anything we talked about today.

[00:26:54] Email me, techblogwriteroutlook.com, LinkedIn, x, Instagram, just at Neil C. Hughes. I hope this conversation has given you something to think about. It certainly has me. But as I said, I'd love to hear what you think are the biggest potential benefits or risks of agentic AI in the next few years. Bye for now.